In a word, "no". Backticks return the standard output of the executed command to the lvalue of the expression (which can be null). It's possible you could torture one of the open commands + redirection to do what you want. On the other hand, print statements aren't that hard. Why do you want to avoid using them?

The reason for this request is just to avoid unnecessay printing information. But now I have a real problem. Please take a look at the code below. I would like to make a copy of the parsead[2] which is an integer and save it in a vector @numofAds for later use. In MATLAB it is very easy to do this. In Perl I cannot do that. What is wrong with my code and how I can correct it please?